Turkey’s supreme court of appeals demands reversal of ruling in Turkish singer’s murder case

ANKARA

The supreme court of appeals’ prosecutor’s office has demanded the reversal of a local court decision’s reduced jail sentence given to Orhan Munis, the murderer of singer Hatice Kaçmaz, ruling that he had committed the crime on charges of “premeditated murder” instead of a killing of “passionate love,” daily Milliyet reported on Oct. 16.

The incident concerns the death of Kaçmaz, a vocalist for public broadcaster TRT’s live music programs, by Munis who stabbed Kaçmaz 16 times in a park in Ankara in 2014. An Ankara court then sentenced Munis to a life sentence in 2015 instead of an aggravated life sentence for her murder, on the grounds that he did not stab the singer “deliberately,” but out of “passionate love,” as the singer had rejected the killer’s marriage proposal.

The court had said Munis’ act of stabbing could not be considered a “deliberate homicide,” as “he took a knife to the park where they [Munis and Kaçmaz] always met, out of sentiment and rage rooted from excessive love at the level of passion,” in its decision, thus making it a crime of passion, not reason.

The supreme court of appeals’ prosecutor’s office, however, has demanded an overturn of the Ankara court’s decision in a letter of notification, as it emphasized the murder was not committed out of a burst of anger, but instead, a result of “stages of thinking, decision-making, planning and execution,” daily Milliyet reported.

With a life sentence in Turkey, those convicted usually leave prison after around 15 years. In this case, if Kaçmaz’s murderer, Orhan Munis, had been sentenced to an aggravated life sentence instead of a life sentence, he would have stayed behind bars for more than 30 years.